Once Within a Time (2023)
dir. Godfrey Reggio & Jon Kane
Rated: N/A
image: ©2023 Oscilloscope Laboratories
Legendary experimental documentary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s newest project helped me understand what frustrated me so much about the 2021 film Don’t Look Up. That’s director Adam McKay’s cri de coeur polemic about our rapid destruction of the planet and our steadfast complacency to do anything about it, including even recognizing that there’s a problem. In my review for Don’t Look Up, I primarily focused on McKay’s ineffective smugness as a tool for chastising the general public for refusing to take the threat of climate change seriously. (In the film, a meteor’s impending collision with earth is used as a metaphor for climate change.)
While watching Reggio’s latest picture, Once Within a Time – the documentarian shares a co-directing credit with Jon Kane, who served as editor on Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi and Visitors – similar feelings surfaced to the ones I had while watching Don’t Look Up. Once Within a Time doesn’t have a smugness problem. Reggio’s film is playful, at times impenetrable, and evinces a bemused perplexity at the current human condition more than any need to arrogantly lecture. My frustration with the film – and, what I belatedly realized was my frustration with Don’t Look Up – is the missed opportunity of targeting the actual culprits that have caused our current situation.
Clocking in at a slim 51 minutes (over eight minutes of which are dedicated to the end credits sequence) Once Within a Time, like the overwhelming majority of Reggio’s work, is pure tone poem. The film is a loosely connected series of vignettes that holds a mirror up to our technology-obsessed culture and highlights the detrimental effects that our obsession is causing both to our species and the planet.
My frustration, both with Once Within a Time and Don’t Look Up, is rooted in the feeling that both films are incomplete in their arguments.
At about the midway point in Reggio’s film, the camera slowly tracks in on a giant hourglass sitting on top of a children’s merry-go-round, surrounded by a sand covered wasteland. Peeking out beneath the sand dunes surrounding it, and under the merry-go-round, is a two-lane road. An abandoned fuel tanker truck sits partially buried in the sand on one side. A dual procession of derelict teetering power transmission towers run along both sides into the distance, where an impossibly gigantic sun scorches everything beneath it. It is an apocalyptic mise-en-scène to say the least.
Each vignette is initially presented as taking place on a stage, for an audience, with footlights and curtains to fully set the scene. As the camera moves past the curtains and the edges of the stage, making the world of the performance all enveloping, we are treated to shots of heat shimmers warping the transmission towers. I live in Texas; the blistering, oppressive heat that Reggio and Kane conjure for this sequence feels like an August afternoon here, when temperatures regularly soar well above 100° F.
The film cuts back to the oversized hourglass. As its bottom begins to fill with sand, a family of four, sitting in chairs around a table, materializes on the screen. They are inside the hourglass. Unbothered by the sand falling on top of them, each family member is lost in a siloed existence. You can probably guess what device is causing their disconnectedness from one another. Each person is scrolling absentmindedly on their cell phone.
The overwhelming experience I got from the sequence, as well as from others within the movie, is the sense that we’ve seen this before. This is nothing new. For at least a decade, cultural critics and social scientists have been sounding the alarm on the harm that our obsession with personal communication devices is causing. What would have been more satisfying, what would have felt revelatory and fresh, would have been Reggio constructing a sequence (or five) that attacked the real perpetrators. Those would be the morbidly rich millionaire and billionaire corporate titans who decided that destroying the planet or getting the population addicted to social media and ever more inflammatory content was good for business and for padding their already obscene bank accounts. Holding the average citizen up for scorn – which isn’t exactly what Reggio is doing here, but you get my point – feels unsatisfying and incomplete.
As one of the best political/protest rock bands ever formed once said, “Fuck tha G ride, I want the machines that are makin' em.” My pitchfork will only be satisfied when it finds robber barons, not the hapless victims of their disregard for ecological balance or public health and safety.
As I discovered after screening the similar film Samsara – which was directed by Ron Fricke, Reggio’s cinematographer on Koyaanisqatsi – I much prefer these sorts of hypnotic, almost psychedelic, nonnarrative experiments when it is devoid of obviously staged and wholly constructed sequences.
Reggio, who practically invented the form with his Qatsi trilogy (apologies to Dziga Vertov and his stunning 1929 Soviet film Man with a Movie Camera), has a wonderful ability to capture scenes of human existence and the majesty of nature and juxtapose them to make meaningful, often times moving, dialectical statements. One of the most rewarding experiences of watching the Qatsi trilogy is letting the images and sounds wash over you and allowing your mind to make whatever connections it will.
With Once Within a Time, the message Reggio is trying to convey is much more concrete, and the film’s entirety is a wholly constructed fiction, which isn’t as satisfying as his earlier, purely documentary work. That’s not to say Once Within a Time isn’t beguiling. It’s easy to fall into the film’s idiosyncratic rhythm and to be mesmerized by its unique aesthetic.
Reggio’s probing mind is a wonder. During his film, we experience a digital update of the Adam and Eve forbidden fruit parable. The apple – which, in a twist, the male character bites into – is introduced with the distinctive sound that accompanies an Apple computer booting up. The man is seduced not by a snake, but by a man who speaks only in gibberish, like every other character in the film. As soon as he takes a bite, binary code begins spilling into the air, a representation of the zeros and ones that have come to define our modern way of life. A close up shot of the apple reveals that it contains a digital wonderland of television static and slot machine symbols.
Along the way, we see a wooden puppet wearing a paper cutout mask of 20-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg encouraging young children – who, appearing in almost every sequence, act as the anchor to the film – to climb out of what appears to be a trojan horse. The Thunberg puppet is surrounded by oversized cell phones. The sequence ends with the camera traveling into one of the cell phone screens, where we see a shiny UFO saucer zip over a blurred highway.
I haven’t even gotten to disgraced former heavyweight boxing campion – and convicted rapist – Mike Tyson turning up as a sort of Pied Piper character credited simply as The Mentor. The kids, as in most of the movie, provide a demonstration in the Kuleshov effect, as the camera cuts back and forth between their inquisitive, sometimes perplexed, expressions and whatever they’re looking at in the moment. As much of a handle as I thought I had on the message that Once Within a Time is conveying, there is still plenty that is open to infinite interpretation and pondering.
Back at the aural helm is Reggio’s regular partner-in-crime, master composer Philip Glass. If you’ve seen any of the duo’s Qatsi trilogy, you’ll have a good idea of what you’ll find in Glass’s latest score. Glass is known for idiosyncratic, syncopated rhythms. That’s certainly true for his work on Once Within a Time, even if his effort here is more muted than the grand, insistent melodies present in something like Koyaanisqatsi.
Despite much of the post-production look of the film resembling any number of Instagram filters, Reggio knows how to orchestrate images at which one wants to keep looking. It’s like seeing a high-fashion model whose gaze you find yourself staring into, helpless to look away. Matched with the baroque, almost Cirque du Soleil-like performances throughout and Philip Glass’s haunting score, Once Within a Time is, at times, a mesmerizing curio that is an echo of Reggio’s earlier masterpieces.
Why it got 3 stars:
- While it’s certainly visually arresting, Reggio’s bemused and perplexed view of the current state of the human race never quite clicked for me. Reggio is a titan as far as I’m concerned. Discovering the Qatsi trilogy was a transcended movie experience for me. I’m so glad Reggio is still out there, doing his thing.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Each of the kids having facial recognition lines sweep over their faces is a jarring statement on the terrifying places that our obsession with technology — and let’s be blunt, most of that obsession is in service of making rich people even richer — is taking us.
- In one sequence, the sky is literally falling, which leaves no room for confusion on Reggio’s interpretation of our current situation.
- Reggio and the film leave us with one final question, which is printed on the screen in multiple languages: “Which age is this: the sunset or the dawn?” The more salient question in my mind (because I have no doubt that this is, in fact, a sunset for our current way of life) is will the dawn that comes after the sunset be better or worse than what came before it? It can go either way, but things aren’t looking great!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I was able to see Once Within a Time via a screener link from the studio. The film is currently playing in limited release theatrically, and I’m assuming (hoping) it will be available on most streaming platforms for rent or purchase soon.